Lands beyond the sunset

As we were taught in our distant childhood, it little profits that an idle king (doctor, botanist or missionary) mete and dole stuff by a still hearth. We cannot rest from travel, as these close-to-2,000 pages of double-columned small print attempt to prove. In a couple of beautifully produced volumes, each the size of a saddlebag, the former physics teacher and now keen traveller Raymond Howgego has listed the biographies of many of the happy heroes who strove, sought and found unknown lands beyond the sunset. From the Spanish Franciscan friar Matias Abad, who reached the Atrato River in Colombia in 1648 and whose ‘enthusiasm for attracting settlers and prospectors to the regions,’ Howgego tells us, ‘was cut short two years later when he was killed by an Indian spear’, to the Russian naval officer Lavrentii A. Zagoskin who ‘journeyed up and down the Yukon (known to the Russians as the Kvichpack), the Koyukuk and middle and lower Kuskokwim rivers’, this delightful encyclopaedia reads more like Waugh and Firbank than Rand McNally.